Our youngest daughter is a four-year-old force to be reckoned with. Whenever I come home, she will always scream “Daddy!” with unbridled excitement and run in a full sprint to be scooped up in my arms and swung around. She has a wild imagination and loves to play pretend. She is never one to play independently - she craves constant social connection, adventures at the park or downtown, a special treat wherever we go, and constant sensory input. She is just wired differently - fierce, fiery, stubborn, and way too smart for her age.
She emits this impressive high pitched screech when she didn’t get her way or whenever we strap her into her carseat. We initially thought to ourselves, “After a while, she’ll surely calm down, right?” Wrong. She can maintain the same eardrum-piercing decibel level for 20+ minutes. Neighbors several houses away have attested to her screaming acumen, wondering if our house is haunted by a wailing banshee.
When she is overwhelmed or tired of walking, she will either slouch over and start walking real slow as if she is an old granny, or simply plop herself on the ground and refuse to move, even in the middle of a crowded walkway at Disneyland or on State Street.
Should her 7-year-old brother try to correct her, accidentally nudge her, or merely try to talk to her at the wrong time? She’ll go right for the jugular and attack - trying to hit him, pinch him, or scratch his face.
Her clothes are constantly too tight or too loose (even though these outfits fit just fine the previous week), resulting in her taking everything off and requiring us to make last minute wardrobe changes instead of finally being on time to preschool.
Our little one melts down at the sign of any perceived unfairness, and in a family with four kids, there is always perceived unfairness. “He got birthday presents and I didn’t” (It wasn’t her birthday). “He got more yogurt than me” (The containers were the same size). “I didn’t get a toy” (You don’t get something at every shop we enter).
When called out on her behavior, she will escalate. She will throw things, tip over chairs, try to hit, and make the whole world know she is upset. We hold strong, stand our ground, and calmly wait for her to use her words to ask for what she wants. She is generally inclined to hold out as well and refuse to give up any territory, even if she just has to say “please” or “I’m sorry” in a calm voice to actually get what she wants.
She is our little hyperactive, defiant powerhouse, and she sometimes (okay, often) makes us question our collective parenting and professional competencies as parents, a psychologist, and an educator. We joke that she will either be a CEO of a very successful company someday or end up in jail (albeit running a very successful criminal enterprise).
Fierce Love
Don’t get me wrong, I love our youngest daughter with all of my heart. She also loves fiercely, and wants nothing more than to play with dolls or horses together, go on special date to the park or downtown, or hang out as a whole family. She is very social and has a growing number of friends - all of whom adore her, as she is very well-behaved at preschool and on playdates. Our youngest daughter is always up for an adventure, loves spicy food, and is always thinking about her 7-year-old brother (her self-proclaimed best friend) when she is offered the chance to buy ice cream, a smoothie, or some candy. She’s just wired in a way where she is very sensitive to sensory input, easily overwhelmed, and constantly prone to entering a stage of fight or flight. And she usually opts to fight.
It can be extremely hard to be responsive to the needs of a challenging child, especially when you have other children who also have their own wants and needs. More than once, a fun family outing has been highjacked by a meltdown or sudden act of aggression. Quiet, slow mornings have sometimes become overwhelming spectacles. Sibling playdates suddenly become challenging when our little honey badger wants to tag along and insert herself into each activity. It takes tremendous amounts of patience and mental resources to respond each time with empathy, love, and patience. Sometimes we don’t have these resources and instead erupt in frustration ourselves, leaving the whole family more upset and increasingly drained.
We know that our youngest daughter doesn’t want to be this way. Much of the time, she is joy. She is doing the best that she can, and she would make better choices and have more impulse control and increased patience if she could. She just needs our help to get there.
The Incident
Our two little ones were playing together in the living room when they started squabbling. Our youngest daughter didn’t like what her brother said and hit him in the face. I immediately snatched her up and carried her off, informing her that it was not okay to hit. We needed to take a break from playing to cool off in her room. She absolutely lost it, yelling, screaming, and going boneless to slip out of my arms and onto the ground of her room. I calmly closed the doors with us inside and stood in front of them to block her way out. She was so enraged that she tried to push past me. In her desperation, she managed to scratch me hard on my lower back with her fingernails. I angrily told her that she really hurt me and showed her what she did.
She lost it even more. Tears were streaming down, she was screaming over and over while staring at me, and looked increasingly out of control. Conventional parenting wisdom would tell me to shut her in her room by herself for a timeout, or maybe even take away a favorite toy or activity. Surely she must be punished for her behavior, right? However, as I stood with her, I saw something. A flicker of fear and vulnerability. A little girl spiraling out of control, unable to regulate her emotions, and terrified.
On instinct, I swooped her up in a big bear hug and held her tightly. Instantly, her body melted into mine and her tension was gone. I was surprised when her next words were “I’m sorry I scratched you. I didn’t mean to” through her lingering sobs. I continued to hold her tight and talk to her in a calm, quiet voice. I echoed back that she was sorry she scratched me and that she felt bad for hurting me. Very quickly, her nervous system calmed to the point where we could talk about what happened and process what she was experiencing.
Emotional Regulation
Young children often struggle to regulate their emotions. Heck, even adults struggle with emotions. It is a competency that takes a while to establish, as it requires the brain to mature and onboard new capabilities. Those who are neurodivergent sometimes take even longer to learn this critical skill, as challenges with impulse control, sensory sensitivities, social communication, and decreased sensitivity to both reward and consequences can delay things.
Children learn regulation largely through observation of other people, talks about emotions, and the experiential process of “learning by doing”. Not surprisingly, they need to actually experience lots of big emotions and attempt to work through them to get better at doing so. The benefit of being human is that we can learn a lot from jointly shared experiences and watching others. Before children can independently regulate their emotions, they can learn to co-regulate them with the assistance of their parents and family members.
Synchrony
Parents and children tend to engage in behavioral and physiological synchrony, meaning that as they interact, their actions and physiology become more in sync as they become increasingly engaged and attuned with one another. Think of a game of peek-a-boo. There is mutual anticipation, eye contact, smiles, and laughter. As they interact, their heart rate, skin conductance, and even temperature become increasingly in sync. Bodies, minds, and behavior sync up and become aligned as they interact.
Emotional Co-Regulation in Children
There is also a benefit to intentionally choosing to not be in sync. Creating emotional contrast (for example, staying calm and relaxed in the face of their meltdown), can help pull someone out of their emotional spiral. It is usually not prudent for a parent to match their child’s energy and also get upset (although we sometimes can’t help but also escalate as we grow increasingly stressed or angry at our child). When your child’s nervous system is overwhelmed and they are behaviorally and physiologically escalated, there is a benefit to creating intentional dissonance by remaining cool, calm, and collected.
If we can manage to stay calm, talk to them with slow soothing words, maintain a supportive facial expression, and use physical affection like a hug, hand on their shoulder, or back rub, we can help them to deescalate and co-regulate. They benefit from us physically modeling being calm with our words, body language, and physical touch. Their bodies and minds gradually find synchrony with ours again.
If you’ve ever tried to talk to a child who is actively melting down, you know that you might as well be shouting into the wind - they aren’t taking in any information, no matter how helpful or logical it is. Once we help our child deescalate and become regulated again, their brain comes back online and reacquires the capacity to talk about what happened and learn from the experience. So, the resulting benefit is two-fold. You first help them calm down in the moment (creating a experiential learning opportunity), and then you create a window to discuss how to regulate emotions even better in the future (creating a second, discussion-based learning opportunity to actually process the situation).
Processing and Validating Strong Emotions
What does this emotional processing look like?
Once they are calm, we can help them identify and validate their emotions. We might acknowledge that they were really upset, or scared, or sad, or overwhelmed. If we know the source of their strong emotion, we can explicitly identify this connection. We might tell them that they got really angry because they thought their sibling was being mean, or that they were sad because they didn’t get the toy they wanted at the store.
We can then validate that we understand why they felt the way they did, even if we don’t approve of what they did when they were upset. We can reassure tell them that it is always okay to feel upset, scared, sad, overwhelmed, or (insert strong emotion here), but that having these feelings does not make it okay to hurt other people, break things, or be unsafe. We can then offer alternatives for how they can deal with strong emotions. In the end, it doesn’t matter if we personally think our child was being reasonable or justified in responding the way they did, because most of the time, we probably won’t. But we can show empathy and understand their perspective as a tiny human being. We just need to remember that in their eyes, this WAS a really big deal that caused big emotions that they didn’t know how to deal with. Ultimately, we are teaching them that no matter what, they are loved and supported, even when they have big feelings.
The Right Situation
It would be wrong to assume that all kids need is a big hug to solve their emotional regulation problems. This specific co-regulation strategy is one of many tools that parents can use to help children learn to better understand and be in control of their emotions and behavior. There are specific situations where co-regulation strategies can be useful, and others when it would not be helpful. If your child is actively attempting to harm you or their siblings, it is best to ensure everyone is physically safe and set firm limits for safety purposes. If they are trying to manipulate a situation to get their way (melting down so that you buy them a toy or to avoid going to school), helping them co-regulate in that moment would also not be useful.
The right situation is generally when a child is utterly overwhelmed and spiraling. It gets tricky because sometimes it starts with them fighting with a sibling or wanting something they can’t have, but then evolves into something more significant. One helpful indicator is when things have gone on so long that they may don’t even remember why they are upset. Or they have been in a mood most of the morning (or day), nothing seems to be going right for them, and everything seems to set them off. They aren’t necessarily trying to get anything or get out of something, but they can’t seem to calm down. Alternatively, they might be upset about something that can't be changed or fixed, like a parent being gone for the night or the weekend, the end of a fun vacation, grandparents leaving to return home, or the death of a pet. These are all situations when they need help co-regulating.
Incident #2
My youngest daughter loves to play pretend with us, but she usually likes to dictate how we play with her, even going so far as to offer us a script that we are strongly “encouraged” to follow. On this particular day, we were playing preschool, and she didn’t like how I was performing in my role as the preschool teacher. We are working on flexibility, so I told her that when people play together, they are both allowed to contribute ideas and play how they want. One person can offer suggestions to the other person but they can’t tightly control what they do. My daughter didn’t like this and out of frustration, hit me. I calmly told her that we couldn’t play any more if she was going to hit. We abruptly stopped playing and I took her to her room.
Again, she flopped on the ground and escalated. She raged, pulled stuffed animals out and threw them on the floor, screamed, kicked, and tried to get past me. I sat, looked at her supportively, told her that we could go back out once she was calm, and waited. I had no timeline, and I was okay with just sitting for a while. After tantruming for a long time and finally exhausting her efforts to escape, she finally approached me and fell into my arms. I hugged her deeply. She apologized for hitting me, she sat in my lap, and we talked about what just happened. She gradually became calm again and increasingly able to talk about her big feelings, and then we went back out to play.
Thanks for being so open to share these difficult situations and your solutions and insights. We all have these moments with our kids and it’s so hard to know how to handle them. Your responses in your two examples demonstrated a lot of patience and empathy.